Boston, planets, bastards

I'm back from spending the past week+ in Boston. Fun time! THe main goal was visiting Fanw, who I hadn't seen in *four years*. What was I thinking? Fortunately, while I've had various other friendships drift apart, I felt as comfortable with her as ever, after all this time. I'm grateful.

I didn't explore Boston nearly as much as I might have -- museums, seafood? MIT? natch -- but I don't feel bad about it. I've always gotten more out of travelling to people than to places, and I ran into a lot of sleep deprivation... some brought with me, some incurred by staying up a bit too late, but also incurred from housemates getting up ungodly early, downstairs neighbors starting a dance party at 1am, 50 mph winds making the house creak scarily, and so on. Basically I'm a noise-sensitive sleeper, and it was a noisy house, so past the weekend I semi-crashed until the evenings.

Which were fun too, as I roped in more people. The evening that I got in, she took me to a Caltech reception and talk from the current president. That was nicer than expected -- seems to appreciate the student culture. He also said a band or choir will be performing at Carnegie Hall, and amused me by saying "they probably won't be the best to ever perform there, but (stuff I forget)", which amused me, as it seemed a sign of engineer's honesty, saying things normal people shouldn't even patently true. But anyway, besides seeing Riiiiich! briefly, I met and chatted with an alum from around my time, and we got to talking about dancing, she said she had no coordination, I said it was probably just a matter of practice, and the next day I thought to try inviting her to a Monday swing dance that I'd noticed a post-it for on Fanw's fridge. We met first for Vietnamese -- my first pho -- and then went dancing, my tutoring bracketing a rather well-done lindy hop lesson from the organizers, where I thought she did decently well for a newbie with no confidence or experience, and she said it was more fun than she expected. Then the next night I lured her out again, for dinner with Mad (who has webcomic) and husband.

Wednesday I mostly did hide indoor, after a walk, but that moves us to linkage:
subvocalization tech approaches; moving the Earth is proposed via comet fly-bys, which is actually a rather slow and conservative method (format: ZIPfile of GIFs); Charlie "githyanki" Stross writes up the US Presidential candidates as D&D monsters; British Columbia starts a decently well done carbon tax (via a_steep_hill); and someone fanwanks Palpatine's plots into making sense. Grey goo may not be such a big threat, if you run some numbers; an oil company in Chad is experimenting with being socially responsible; someone writes up Geoffrey Landis's Venusian aerostats for Transhuman Space.

Also, I read Steven Brust's Firefly fanfic novel, My Own Kind of Freedom, which I liked a lot. Slid into the mood of it in just a few pages, and had to remind myself later that it wasn't canon -- characters and lines felt very on the mark.

Fanw took me by a game store nearby, which compared to Bloomington's Game Preserve felt a lot more 'standard' -- dingy looks (something about all those bagged miniatures on the wall and lack of decor) and very male -- she was the only girl there, and it was pretty crowded at 10pm Saturday, with a couple of basement rooms filled with boys gaming. OTOH, it also had more *stuff* than Game Preserve -- well, possibly fewer board games, but a lot more RPG books, and more than just d20, Warhammer, and a smattering of White Wolf; more like full White Wolf and a lot of GURPS. And a box full of out of print on-sale books whose volume nearly matched everything the Game Preserve sells. I got Technocracy Assembled 2 and GURPS Space.

And today's special: Justus Möser, conservative concern troll from 1772. "On the Diminished Disgrace of Whores and Their Children in Our Day.